Blogging Roller

Struts Live author and JRoller blogger Johathan Lehr: "Struts 2.0, code-named Shale will be based on the JSF spec." The proof is on the Wiki, the developer mailing list, and in a detailed proposal checked into CVS. Update: Further discussion at Raible's place.

Tim Bray wonders why somebody would assert that blogs and wikis are converging because "in their essential nature, it seems like they couldn’t be more different."

Danny Ayers responds that "it’s not that they’re 'converging' it’s that they’re fundamentally the same kind of system."

My opinion? Blogs and wikis are similar in that they both aim to make it easy to "write the web" and as web systems, they both can benefit from many of the same technologies/features such as syndication, referers, trackbacks, WYSIWYG editors, etc. At the same time, they are different in essential nature, as Tim points out, but they differ in complementary ways -- and that's why they go so well together.

Blogs and wikis are merging. The evidence to support this assertion is the growing popularity of blikis or wikiblogs which include both blog and wiki capabilities. Some of these are wikis with blog features grafted on, some of them are blogs with wiki integration features, and some that are (or appear to be) designed from the ground up to be combined systems. Danny points out Bill Sietz's Wikilog and Martin Fowler's Bliki, but there are many more examples of combined wiki and blog systems.

For examples of wikis with blogging capabilities see TikiWiki, Meatball:WikiLog, and JSPWiki.

For examples of blogs that support wiki integration features see Movable Type (plugins WeblogWithWiki and MT-Twiki) , Wordpress (plugin WordPressWiki), Roller, and Blojsom.

For examples of combined systems look at Atlassian's Confluence, SnipSnap and SocialText.

BTW, I've written about this before.

A couple of business/corporate blogging links for you today:

• Leading financial analysts' report on blogs and RSS a must read
• General Motors is blogging
• IT Kitchen: Blogs in the Workplace
• Blog Business Summit to be held in Seattle, Jan 24-25, 2005
• Enterprise RSS: All about RSS in the enterprise
• Can Blogging Help Market Your Product?

The people of America have failed us today: "As Larry says, "It's over. Let it go." Jon is saying, "Don't complain - organize!" Although the previous post about the wacky voting system is interesting, it's unlikely that any sort of recount or technicality will change the fact that today, the people of the United States of America have voted for George Bush. It was close, but the Americans have chosen Bush. It's a sad day, but in a democracy, you get the politicians you deserve/vote for. This was their chance to change their leader and they have failed. For awhile, many of us thought that they had been conned into voting for Bush - that they didn't know he wanted to be a War President. Many people didn't equate the US policies with the people of America. We thought they had made a mistake. Now US policies = US Citizens. You Americans have my sympathies, but it's still your fault.

Now that Roller 1.0 is almost complete, I've been thinking about what comes next. One of the most obvious next steps is weblog entry metadata and a better weblog entry plugin facility to support that metadata. I wrote this up as a short proposal. It needs work and your feedback is welcome (here or on the Roller dev list).

Politically, I'm pretty far left of Kerry. Normally, when I think about voting I think about so called "liberal" issues like equal rights, social safety net, environment, and gun control. This election, I don't have to think about those issues at all to decide who to vote for. This year, there is no choice. Our president lied to us to justify going to war when we did not need to, he ignored the expert planners in our intellience and defense agencies, he mismanaged the war to the point of disaster, and from day one he has been stuck in constant political campaign mode -- unable to admit that he or any of his subordinates made a single mistake. The guy should be thrown out of office, right now. I don't even need to talk about how we are mistreating prisoners in Iraq and Cuba. I don't need to talk about US citizens being denied fair trial. Case closed, but that's just me.

Folks are so polarized this year that I don't have a snowball's chance in hell of convincing you Bush supporters to throw the guy out. Maybe some of your conservative brethren can change your mind. This election, many republicans, conservatives, and former Bush supporters are re-considering their candidate and either endorsing Kerry or refusing to vote for Bush. Here are some of them. If you are planning on voting for Bush, please follow the links and these endoresements in full. (the emphasis below is mine):

The Economist: Invading Iraq was not a mistake. Although the intelligence about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction has been shown to have been flimsy and, with hindsight, wrong [ . . . ] But changing the regime so incompetently was a huge mistake. By having far too few soldiers to provide security and by failing to pay Saddam's remnant army, a task that was always going to be long and hard has been made much, much harder. Such incompetence is no mere detail: thousands of Iraqis have died as a result and hundreds of American soldiers. The eventual success of the mission, while still possible, has been put in unnecessary jeopardy. So has America's reputation in the Islamic world, both for effectiveness and for moral probity.

Scott McConnell, American Conservative magazine: The record, from published administration memoirs and in-depth reporting, is one of an administration with a very small group of six or eight real decision-makers, who were set on war from the beginning and who took great pains to shut out arguments from professionals in the CIA and State Department and the U.S. armed forces that contradicted their rosy scenarios about easy victory.

Andrew Sullivan writing in New Republic magazine: The lack of stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq remains one of the biggest blows to America's international credibility in a generation. The failure to anticipate an insurgency against the coalition remains one of the biggest military miscalculations since Vietnam. And the refusal to send more troops both at the beginning and throughout the occupation remains one of the most pig-headed acts of hubris since the McNamara era. I'm amazed that more war advocates aren't incensed by this mishandling of such critical matters. But even a Bush-supporter, like my friend, Christopher Hitchens, has termed it "near-impeachable" incompetence.

And carefully consider this list of Republicans for Kerry in 2004

And this blog which documents Republican Swtichers which includes 42 newspapers (compared to 6 that switched the other way)

And this collection of video ads featuring Real People who voted for George Bush in 2000, but will be voting for Kerry in 2004

More news from the blog your build department from Lasse Koskela who has added MetaWeblog API support to his Cruise Control WeblogPublisher.

Finally!

Roller 1.0 RC1 is available for testing. Read all about it on the Roller Project Blog.

Wiki hype soon to eclipse Blog hype?

• WikiNews - all the news that's fit to GET, POST, PUT, or DELETE
• Slashdot: Are We headed for a Wiki World?
• Newsfeed: It's Like a Blog But it's a Wiki
• Wiki startup JotSpot draws crowd for product beta

Today Simon Brown pointed out a brief but interesting article he wrote called Blog Your Build. Simon wrote a couple of very cool little Ant tasks that make it possible for a build script to blog - to post messages to a weblog. Sounds crazy, but it is a really cool idea.

Build system blogging, newsfeed aggregators, newsfeed enabled source code control servers, newsfeed enabled issue trackers, blogs, and wikis make it possible to build a powerful dashboard website - a dashblog if you will - for a software development project.

I imagine a development dashblog as a portal like site that looks a lot like Javablogs.com. The dashblog aggregates all of the project developer's blogs together into a project blog. Like Javablogs.com does, a dashblog might allow each reader to choose favorite blogs to be highlighted and those to be excluded from the main page. In the sidebars of the dashblog are displayed newsfeeds from the projects issue tracking system, the automatically generated build blog, the recent changes of the project's wiki, recent checkins to the projects source code control system, and news from other team's dashblogs.

Does your team already have a development dashblog?

Update: Hey, that's kind like this: Wordpress RSS Aggregator (found via del.icio.us)

Scoble wants to know why your boss won't let you blog.

Congrats to Matt who has just released verison 1.0 of his SourceBeat book Spring Live.

Slashdot announces The Official Launch of the Treo 650. This is perfect timing for me, because my existing phone - a Visor Platinum PDA with phone attachment - is about to die. Unfortunately, Sprint, which happens to be my carrier, has crippled the Treo 650 so that it cannot be used to connect a computer to the net. Guess it is time to ditch Sprint.

To set the Roller 1.0 release apart I created a new color scheme, new banner, and a new badge. You can see the new color scheme and banner on the main page of this site.

It sure would be nice to get a real web designer to help out with the Roller theme. I'm able to create designs that almost pass as professional, but are far from inspiring. And wouldn't it be nice to have a real logo like the beautiful one Matt scored for AppFuse?

I created a branch for Roller 1.0 and we are now working towards a Roller 1.0RC1 release this week. Before the RC1 release, I hope to update the Installation Guide and to write up a summary of the many changes that we've made since the last release - which was 0.9.8.3. After the RC1 release, I will work on testing, updating the User Guide, and creating a HSQLDB-based standalone demo release. Once we're happy with a Roller 1.0 RC on blogs.sun.com (and jroller.com), we'll release Roller 1.0.

Roller 1.0 is essentially same code base that is currently running on jroller.com, plus security, spam control, and user admin features needed for blogs.sun.com. Roller 1.0 has not yet been deployed either jroller.com or blogs.sun.com, but I hope to upgrade both sites before the final 1.0 release.

I met my stretch goal last week, which was to implement metaWeblog.newMediaObject. NewMediaObject makes it easy to upload images from a blog client such as Ecto or MarsEdit (and I've tested it with both).

Another stretch goal was to upgrade Roller's experimental Atom feed support to support Atom 0.3, which is the version of Atom currently supported by the feedvalidator. As you can see by clicking on the Atom badge above, I now have a valid Atom 0.3 newsfeed.

Jeff Chilton writes in Websphere Power about his adventures porting Roller to Websphere. He tried to take the standalone Roller demo release, which anybody can install in less than 30 seconds, over to Websphere and found - big surprise here - Websphere is a pain in the ass. Want to find out if Roller runs on Websphere? You'll have to wait for part II.

MacCentral: Sun Java Studio Creator supports Mac OS X: "Sun Microsystems Inc. on Wednesday announced the release of Sun Java Studio Creator for Mac OS X and Solaris (x86 Platform Edition) operating systems. It's also now available in Japanese and simplified Chinese languages. Java Studio Creator lets Java developers create business applications"

In other Netbeans related news: Netbeans 4.1 Early Access release is available. Netbeans 4.1 EA includes "over 15 new modules for developing J2EE 1.4 applications" including support for J2ME, EJB, Web services, and the Sun Java Application Server 8.1.

Via Cory Doctorow. Jonathan Schwartz critizes HP in his blog, HP lawyers demand that Schwartz removes the criticism, and Sun fires right back:

Once again, in certain of the places this is a statement of opinion by Jonathan Schwartz. His opinion is based on his good faith assessment of the current climate of HP. Alternatively, however, Sun will also stand behind this as a statement of fact that is true and accurate based on the above substantiation. As detailed by the above facts, we have seen signs that HP is abandoning HP/UX.

Jonathan Schwartz's opinions and even his vigorous debate on this subject as well as Sun's product comparisons and dialog on these commercial matters are inherent in Sun's competition with HP and are part of the free market system in which our companies operate. For our statements of fact, Sun has valid, objective and verifiable evidence. Accordingly, and based on the above, Sun affirmatively stands by its claims regarding HP/UX and will not agree to cease making such truthful and/or subjective claims.

Hmm.. good point(s). HP, here's what you should do: upgrade your internal Roller blog system to Roller 1.0, make it external, and get blogging!

This weekend I'll creating a branch for Roller 1.0 and next week I'll release Roller 1.0 RC1 from that branch.

Don't miss it.